(Insert stupid Blog name here) - Space Cadets (pt. 1)

RSS Bot · July 11, 2006

I've been spending about the last week and a half going through my stuff.

You know the kind of stuff I'm talking about. Everybody has some of it.

Cardboard boxes, with stuff in them, jammed into the back of a closet or attic somewhere.

Stuff that you haven't looked at in years. Years and years. In some cases... decades.

(An aside: the fact that I'm measuring what I consider to be relatively recent events as having passed in "decades" bothers me.)

I didn't think I'd really accumulated that much stuff. After all, my apartment isn't really cluttered. (Certainly not in the way my office at work is.) Most of my stuff has been in boxes, in a couple of closets. But I decided it was time to go through the stuff, find out what was in there, and throw out the stuff that I didn't want to keep anymore.

I have thrown out a lot of stuff. I've also recycled stuff, shredded stuff, and put some stuff in a pile to take over to Goodwill.

It really surprised me how much stuff I had. But now, I have less stuff. A lot less. It was hard getting rid of some of the stuff at first, but after awhile (and the first dozen boxes) it became a lot easier. And the stuff I have now is stuff I want to keep, at least for now. I also know where it is, and can get to it easier, since I sorted it, labeled it, and stuck the stuff into big plastic bins that I can see into, and stack much easier than cardboard boxes.

And as a nice side-effect... I have closets again! Usable ones.

Anyway, what's been interesting is revisiting various periods of my life. From Jr. High School through the present. Through three colleges, several jobs, tons of art classes, a move to California, various relationships, and on and on.

One thing that kept coming up, over and over, is drawing. I've been drawing basically my whole life. I can see different phases I went through as an artist, different interests, improvements, experiments (many failed ones), and stuff that I drew decades (yes... decades) ago, that I still remember to this day.

This is one of those drawings:

Admittedly, it's not much to look at, but I was delighted when I found it. I thought I had lost this drawing years ago, since I recall having looked for it before, to no avail.

So, what's the big deal with it?

Well, this is from my sole attempt at programming a game, all the way back in 1980.

The game was going to be a parody of Space Invaders, called Space Cadets. The idea was to have rather silly-looking aliens dropping, well... droppings.

I was just a kid at the time.

Programmed in BASIC on a TRS-80 (at a Radio Shack Computer Center after school hours), I managed to get as far as making a screen full of these guys march all the way across the screen. They might have gone back, too. Not sure. I also managed (in a separate program) to get the player's ship to move back and forth.

This was a huge accomplishment for me, although that's as far as it ever got. Basically (pun not intended), to get any farther would have actually required "programming skills". What I was doing, was just making some graphics animate. Sort of like a really convoluted animated GIF. Sure, you can make one that looks like a video game, but it's really not.

Since then, and especially since discovering the Homebrew game scene for the 2600, Space Cadets would pop into my mind from time to time. I'd think of new ideas for it, and lament that drawing on graph paper that I'd lost which had all of the sprites on it.

Now though... I've found that old drawing. And I'm thinking it's about time to really flesh-out Space Cadets as a full-fledged game...

...proposal.

I still can't program, but after 26 years, I think I've got some pretty good ideas for the game. It may never get made, since I'm well-aware that the only way it will happen is if a programmer thinks it's interesting enough to spend his or her own time working on it. But at least if I finally put all of the ideas down, maybe, just maybe... this game will leave me alone and let me move onto something else!!

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